Relationships among types of speech intelligibility in pediatric users of cochlear implants

Twenty pediatric users of cochlear implants were administered three tests of speech intelligibility: (1) a test of contrast perception intelligibility, (2) a test of contrast production intelligibility, and (3) a test of production sentence intelligibility. Sixty adults with normal hearing served as listener judges for the two speech production tasks, and percent correct scores were generated for each of the three tasks. Correlational analyses showed significant correlations among overall scores for the three tasks. However, scores for individual feature classes from the contrast perception task were not correlated with their corresponding contrast production feature class scores, and only some of the feature class scores were correlated significantly with sentence intelligibility. We conclude that although these three types of intelligibility are related at a gross level, relationships are more tenuous at finer levels of analysis, suggesting that the separate skills may need to be addressed separately in remediation. Educational objectives: As a result of this activity, the participant will be able to differentiate various methods for assessing speech intelligibility and describe the relationships among different types of speech intelligibility in pediatric users of cochlear implants.